What does this all mean anyway?

Democrats had turned on fellow Democrats, and although the arrows flew in all directions, the nastiest of the invective fell on the ladies who loved Hillary. That these loyal Democrats had been targeted made them nuts. ...

The Democrats clearly have a hooligan problem. It was as though their left-wingers suffered a kind of Karl Rove envy. They wanted to go on the attack, demonize a Clinton and hurl abuse at the Clinton's friends. Only a year ago, Vanity Fair ran a cover story on how Clinton hatred had infected much of the right wing. The left seems to have grabbed the baton. And it apparently did not dawn on the Obama shock troops that they were offending the very people their man might someday need.

The Rovian right never made that mistake with non-candidates.

It reserved its thuggery for people who would never vote for a Republican.

The Democrats' Byzantine nominating procedures and their introverted ideas about electoral “fairness” have led them to choose the less electable of their two main candidates. As a result, they have blown the chance of turning the disaster of the Bush presidency into a Roosevelt-style electoral landslide. It is tempting to conclude that the Democrats have again thrown away an easily winnable election. Tempting, but not yet right.

After securing the nomination in June, Obama's first priority had to be healing the rift between himself and Hillary Clinton. Candidates who can't put nomination battles behind them well before the convention usually lose. Think of Goldwater in 1964, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. There are only two candidates I can remember who succeeded in overcoming intraparty rifts during the convention--John Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald Reagan in 1980--and they did it by nominating their primary opponents to be vice president.